Saturday, 7 November 2015

On This Day in Math - November 7

I am one of those who think, like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.
~Marie Curie

The 311th day of the year; 311 not only prime, but is a prime under any permutation of its digits (113, 131, 311) (students might search for the next smaller, or larger number which is also a permutable prime)

Also, 311 is prime, and is also the sum of three, five, seven, and eleven consecutive primes and the sum of its digits is prime. *PB
It is the first of six consecutive primes for which eliminating the first digit (3) leaves a prime.

EVENTS

1631 Transit of Mercury across the sun, the ﬁrst observation of a transit of a planet, observed by Pierre Gassendi. This had been predicted by Kepler in 1629. [Scott, Works of Wallis, p. 191, had 1621] *VFR When Gassendi observed the dot of Mercury passing across the face of the Sun, he was surprized - it seemed far too small, according to ancient conceptions of the relative sizes of heavenly objects. With a Galilean telescope he observed the transit by projecting the sun's image on a screen of paper. He recorded this in Mercurius in sole visus (1632; Mercury in the Face of the Sun) as support for the new astronomy of Johannes Kepler. His instrument was not strong enough, however, to disclose the occultations and transits of Jupiter's satellites. *TIS Gassendi unsuccessfully attempted to observe the transit of Venus just one month later, but due to inaccurate astronomical tables he did not realize that it was not visible from most of Europe, including Paris. A transit of Venus was not observed until 1639, by Jeremiah Horrocks. (for more on the march to accepting a heliocentric system, see this blog by The Renaissance Mathematicus.)

1725 Nicolaus II and Daniel Bernoulli arrived in St. Petersburg on October 27, 1725 (OS) Nov 7 (NS) 1749 Benjamin Franklin enters in his notebook a list of 12 ways in which lightening and electrical fluid agree, from 1) "giving light", to 12) "sulphurous smell". He then considers whether lightning will be as equally attracted to "points" and lays out the framework for an experiment. *A history of physics in its elementary branches By Florian Cajori 1763 Maskelyne arrives in Barbados during Longitude test. The Princess Louise sailed for Barbados on 23 September. During the voyage Maskelyne and Charles Green took many lunar-distance observations (with Maskelyne later claiming that his final observation was within half of degree of the truth) and struggled a couple of times with the marine chair. Maskelyne’s conclusion was that the Jupiter’s satellites method of finding longitude would simply never work at sea because the telescope magnification required was far too high for use in a moving ship.
On 29 December 1763 he wrote his brother Edmund, reporting his safe arrival on 7 November after “an agreeable passage of 6 weeks”. He noted that he had been “very sufficiently employed in making the observations recommended to me by the Commissioners of Longitude” and that it was at times “rather too fatiguing”. *Board of Longitude project, Greenwich 1849 The official opening of Queen’s College in Cork, Ireland. George Boole was the professor of mathematics—the only university post he ever applied for. [MacHale, George Boole, His Life and Work, p 88].

In 1908, Prof. Ernest Rutherford announced in London that he had isolated a single atom of matter. *TIS 1915 In connection with the celebration of the centenary of Weierstrass' birth (31 October 1815), a memorial tablet was unvieled at his birthplace, Osterfelde, near Warendorf in Westphalia. It reads” “An dieser St¨att wurde am 31•X•1815 Karl Weierstrass, der grosse Mathematiker, eine Leuchte der Berliner Universit¨at, geboren.” *VFR 1917 The “October Revolution” of the Bosheviks broke out in Russia. It is now celebrated on 7 November as the Gregorian calendar was not adopted there until 1918. *VFR Most Americans don't know that US sent ships and ground troops in aide of the White side, Almost all Russians know. 1937 Ernest O. Lawrence appeared on the cover of Time for November 7, 1937, on the occasion of his winning the Comstock Prize of the National Academy of Sciences. The caption under his name says "He creates and destroys."

*aip.org/history 1940 at approximately 11:00 am, the first Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge collapsed due to wind-induced vibrations. Situated on the Tacoma Narrows in Puget Sound, near the city of Tacoma, Washington, the bridge had only been open for traffic a few months. *TIS “Galloping Gertie,” suspension bridge over the Narrows of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington, breaks up from a torsional oscillation of steadily increasing amplitude caused by the wind known as the von Karman vortice street. The ﬁlm is instructive for classes in Differential Equations.

2013 The Bank of Canada began circulating a new $5 note emblazoned with the orbiting outpost's Canadarm2 robotic arm seven months after debuting the space-inspired design aboard the space station.

*space.com

BIRTHS

1660 Thomas Fantet de Lagny (7 Nov 1660 in Lyon, France - 11 April 1734 in Paris, France) De Lagny is well known for his contributions to computational mathematics, calculating π to 120 places and also making useful comments on the convergence of the series he was using. In about 1690 he developed a method of giving approximate solutions of algebraic equations and, in 1694, Halley published a twelve page paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society giving his method of solving polynomial equations by successive approximation which is essentially the same as that given by Lagny a few years earlier. One should note that although methods based on the differential calculus were being developed at this time, neither Lagny not Halley used these new ideas. Lagny's publications on this topic are Méthodes nouvelle infiniment générale et infiniment abrégée pour l'extraction des racines quarrées, cubique (1691) and Méthodes nouvelles et abrégée pour l'extraction et l'approximation des racines (1692).
Lagny constructed trigonometric tables and used binary arithmetic in his text Trigonométrie française ou reformée published in Rochefort in 1703. In 1733 he examined the continued fraction expansion of the quotient of two integers and, as an example, considered adjacent Fibonacci numbers as the worst case expansion for the Euclidean algorithm in his paper Analyse générale ou Méthodes nouvelles pour résoudre les problèmes de tous les genres et de tous les degrés à l'infini.*SAU 1687 William Stukeley FRS, FRCP, FSA (7 November 1687 – 3 March 1765) was an English antiquarian who pioneered the archaeological investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, work for which he has been remembered as "probably... the most important of the early forerunners of the discipline of archaeology". Stukeley was also one of the first biographers of Isaac Newton. Stukeley was a friend of Isaac Newton and wrote a memoir of his life in 1752. This is one of the earliest sources for the story of the falling apple that inspired Newton's formulation of the theory of gravitation.
Becoming involved in the newly fashionable organization of Freemasonry, he also began to describe himself as a "druid", and incorrectly believed that the prehistoric megalithic monuments were a part of the druidic religion. However, despite this he has been noted as being a significant figure in the early development of the modern movement known as Neo-Druidry. *Wik 1799 Karl Gräffe (7 November 1799, Brunswick, Germany- 2 December 1873 , Zurich, Switzerland) Gräffe is best remembered for his "root-squaring" method of numerical solution of algebraic equations, developed to answer a prize question posed by the Berlin Academy of Sciences..*SAU 1867 Marie Marja Sklodowska Curie (7 Nov 1867; 4 Jul 1934) was a Polish-born French chemist and physicist. In 1898, her celebrated experiments on uranium minerals led to discovery of two new elements. First she separated polonium, and then radium a few months later. The quantity of radon in radioactive equilibrium with a gram of radium was named a curie (subsequently redefined as the emission of 3.7 x 1010 alpha particles per sec.) With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was then sole winner of a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. Her family won five Nobel awards in two generations. She died of radiation poisoning from her pioneering work before the need for protection was known. *TIS 1878 Lise Meitner (7 Nov 1878; 27 Oct 1968) Austrian physicist who shared the Enrico Fermi Award (1966) with the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for their joint research beginning in 1934 that led to the discovery of uranium fission. She refused to work on the atom bomb. In 1917, with Hahn, she had discovered the new radioactive element protactinium. She was the first to describe the emission of Auger electrons. In 1935, she found evidence of four other radioactive elements corresponding to atomic numbers 93-96. In 1938, she was forced to leave Nazi Germany, and went to a post in Sweden. Her other work in the field of nuclear physics includes study of beta rays, and study of the three main disintegration series. Later, she used the cyclotron as a tool. *TIS 1888 Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (7 Nov 1888; 21 Nov 1970) Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science in India. He was the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics for the 1928 discovery now called Raman scattering: a change in frequency observed when light is scattered in a transparent material. When monochromatic or laser light is passed through a transparent gas, liquid, or solid and is observed with the spectroscope, the normal spectral line has associated with it lines of longer and of shorter wavelength, called the Raman spectrum. Such lines, caused by photons losing or gaining energy in elastic collisions with the molecules of the substance, vary with the substance. Thus the Raman effect is applied in spectrographic chemical analysis and in the determination of molecular structure. *TIS He was the first Asian and first non-white to receive any Nobel Prize in the sciences.*Wik 1906 Jean Leray was a French mathematician who worked on algebraic topology and differential equations. *SAU

DEATHS

Painting by G. H. Tweedale

1633 Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel (1572 – 7 November 1633) was the Dutch builder of the first navigable submarine in 1620. Drebbel was an innovator who contributed to the development of measurement and control systems, optics and chemistry. Drebbel became famous for his invention in 1621 of a microscope with two convex lenses. Several authors, including Christiaan Huygens assign the invention of the compound microscope to Drebbel. However, a Neapolitan, named Fontana, claimed the discovery for himself in 1618. Other sources attribute the invention of the compound microscope directly to Hans Jansen and his son Zacharias around 1595.
He also built the first navigable submarine in 1620 while working for the English Royal Navy. Using William Bourne's design from 1578, he manufactured a steerable submarine with a leather-covered wooden frame. Between 1620 and 1624 Drebbel successfully built and tested two more submarines, each one bigger than the last. The final (third) model had 6 oars and could carry 16 passengers. This model was demonstrated to King James I in person and several thousand Londoners. The submarine stayed submerged for three hours and could travel from Westminster to Greenwich and back, cruising at a depth of from 12 to 15 feet (4 to 5 metres). Drebbel even took James in this submarine on a test dive beneath the Thames, making James I the first monarch to travel underwater. This submarine was tested many times in the Thames, but it couldn't attract enough enthusiasm from the Admiralty and was never used in combat. (More recently it has been suggested that the contemporary accounts of the craft contained significant elements of exaggeration and it was at most a semi-submersible that was able to travel down the Thames by the force of the current)
He has also been credited by some authors with the invention of the thermometer; while others credit Robert Fludd, Galileo Galilei or Santorio Santorio. Whether or not he invented the thermometer, it seems he invented one of the first known temperature regulators: "about 1620 Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633), a Dutch engineer in the service of King James I of Britain. To maintain constant temperatures in chemical furnaces and in incubators (Figure 88), he connected a thermoscope with a damper so that it would, at excessive temperatures, reduce the oxygen supply to the fire."* (F. M. Gibbs, "The Furnaces and Thermometers of Cornelis Drebbel," Annals of Science 6(1948):32-43.)
While at the court of James I Drebbel demonstrated a number of his inventions. He was most famed for his perpetual motion machine, which told the time, date, and season, and was mounted in a globe on pillars. The invention became so famous that Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, invited Drebbel to Prague in 1610 and 1619. Turbulent imperial politics saw him arrested on both occasions and it was only royal interventions from England that ensured his release.
A small lunar crater has been named after him. *Wik 1872 Rudolf Friedrich Alfred Clebsch (19 January 1833 – 7 November 1872) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He attended the University of Königsberg and was habilitated at Berlin. He subsequently taught in Berlin and Karlsruhe. His collaboration with Paul Gordan in Giessen led to the introduction of Clebsch–Gordan coefficients for spherical harmonics, which are now widely used in quantum mechanics.
Together with Carl Neumann at Göttingen, he founded the mathematical research journal Mathematische Annalen in 1868. *Wik 1913 Alfred Russel Wallace (8 Jan 1823, 7 Nov 1913) British naturalist, and biogeographer (who studies the distribution of organisms). He was the first westerner to describe some of the most interesting natural habitats in the tropics. He is best known for devising a theory of the origin of species through natural selection made independently of Darwin. Between 1854 and 1862, Wallace assembled evidence in the Malay Archipelago, sending his conclusions to Darwin in England. Their findings were presented to the Linnaean Society in 1858. Wallace found that Australian species were more primitive, in evolutionary terms, than those of Asia, and that this reflected the stage at which the two continents had become separated. He proposed an imaginary line (now known as Wallace's line) dividing the fauna of the two regions.*TIS 1918 Artemas Martin (August 3, 1835; Steuben County, New York - November 7, 1918; Washington, DC, United States) was a self-educated American mathematician.
Martin grew up in Venango County, Pennsylvania. He was home-schooled until the age of 14, when he began studying mathematics at the local school, later moving to the Franklin Select School a few miles away and then to the Franklin Academy, finishing his formal education at age approximately 20. He worked as a farmer, oil driller, and schoolteacher.
Martin was a prolific contributor of problems and solutions to mathematical puzzle columns in popular magazines beginning at the age of 18 in the Pittsburgh Almanac and the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post. From 1870 to 1875, he was editor of the "Stairway Department" of Clark's School Visitor, one of the magazines to which he had previously contributed. From 1875 to 1876 Martin moved to the Normal Monthly, where he published 16 articles on diophantine analysis. He subsequently became editor of the Mathematical Visitor in 1877 and of the Mathematical Magazine in 1882.
In 1881, he declined an invitation to become a professor of mathematics at the Normal School in Missouri. In 1885, he became the librarian for the Survey Office of the United States Coast Guard, and in 1898 he became a computer in the Division of Tides.
In 1877 Martin was given an honorary M.A. from Yale University. In 1882 he was awarded another honorary degree, a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and his third honorary degree, an LL.D., was given to him in 1885 by Hillsdale College. He was elected to the London Mathematical Society in 1878, the Société Mathématique de France in 1884, the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in 1885, the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1886, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1890, and the New York Mathematical Society in 1891. He was also a member of the American Mathematical Society, the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, the Mathematical Association of England, and the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung.
He died on November 7, 1918.
Martin maintained an extensive mathematical library, now in the collections of American University. *Wik 1936 Gury Vasilievich Kolosov (25 August 1867; Ust, Novgorod guberniya, Russia
- 7 November 1936 ; Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Russia) was a Russian mathematician who worked on the theory of elasticity. In 1907 Kolosov derived the solution for stresses around an elliptical hole. It showed that the concentration of stress could become far greater, as the radius of curvature at an end of the hole becomes small compared with the overall length of the hole. *SAU 1968 Aleksandr Osipovich Gelfond (24 Oct 1906, 7 Nov 1968) Russian mathematician who originated basic techniques in the study of transcendental numbers (numbers that cannot be expressed as the root or solution of an algebraic equation with rational coefficients). He profoundly advanced transcendental-number theory, and the theory of interpolation and approximation of complex-variable functions. He established the transcendental character of any number of the form ab, where a is an algebraic number different from 0 or 1 and b is any irrational algebraic number, which is now known as Gelfond's theorem. This statement solved the seventh of 23 famous problems that had been posed by the German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. *TIS 2003 Donald R(edfield) Griffin (3 Aug 1915, 7 Nov 2003) American biophysicist, known for his research in animal navigation, animal behaviour, and sensory biophysics. With Robert Galambos, he studied bat echolocation (1938), a term he coined (1944) for how the bat's ears replace eyes in flight guidance. Using specialized high-frequency sound equipment by G.W. Pierce, they found that bats in flight produced ultrasonic sounds used to avoid obstacles. In WW II, he used physiological principles to design such military equipment as cold-weather clothing and headphones. Griffin also worked extensively on bird navigation. In the late 1940s, he flew in a Piper Cub to observe the flight paths of gannets and gulls. In his career, he pioneered rigorous techniques to study animals in their natural environment. *TIS
Credits
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell

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About Me

I'm a retired math teacher, calc-stats-the regular stuff... Interested in Math, math history, and assorted other curiosities.Married and in love with a gorgeous woman. I have a math page on the etymology of math terms, and another, On This Day in Math, which covers historical events related to the current date.